Page:The Chinese Empire. A General & Missionary Survey.djvu/320

couple of coolies who carried the few absolutely necessary things. As the distance from Chungking to Bhamo was performed on foot, and the traveller was each day, and all the day, before the people, who were uniformly kind and friendly, the question of the possibility of missionary residence in Yunnan province was settled in the only satisfactory way it could have been settled at the time.[1]

Another evidence of the goodwill of the people of Yunnan was afforded by the safe arrival, shortly afterwards, in Bhamo of Dr. Cameron of the China Inland Mission. Having travelled west in Szechwan, he entered Yunnan from the north, and, passing Tali Fu, he made his way through Yungchang Fu, Tengyueh, and the Shan States into Burmah. Everywhere he found the people kind and obliging, and by no means antagonistic to the presence of foreigners. Though at that time the British Government would not allow any one to cross from Burmah to China, at a later period the return journey from Bhamo to Shanghai was accomplished by Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Henry Soltau.

No station, however, was opened in the province until 1881, when Mr. George Clark was enabled to secure premises and begin missionary work in the prefectural city of Tali. Yunnan Fu, the capital of the province, was opened in 1882; Kutsing Fu, in the more eastern part of the province, being opened for work in 1886, and Pingyi Hsien, within a day of the Kweichow border and on the road to Anshuen Fu in Kweichow province, was opened for permanent Mission work in 1904.

Much has been done from these various centres during the years since they were opened. Many wide itinerations have been made over various parts of the province, although the results hitherto have been rather discouraging.

Since the reopening of the work in the province in 1901, after the Boxer rising in China, the word, "In due season we shall reap if we faint not," seems to be to

↑For a full account of this journey see a paper read by Mr. M'Carthy before the Royal Geographical Society, and published in the Royal Geographical Society's Magazine for August 1879.—Ed.